


dye my hands crimson

by MargaritaDaemonelix



Series: lonashipping week 2019 [3]
Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, Pocket Monsters: Sun & Moon | Pokemon Sun & Moon Versions, Pocket Monsters: Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon | Pokemon Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon Versions
Genre: Alternate Universe - Karakuri Burst, F/M, Fire, I am so sorry, Lonashipping Week 2019, Robots, Ultra Beasts - Freeform, all i know is that it got. quite ooc towards the end, and re:birthed which is the sequel and also good, and so am i, does this even count as lonashipping, lusamine is an awful awful person, please listen to karakuri burst it's a good song
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 07:08:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19970017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MargaritaDaemonelix/pseuds/MargaritaDaemonelix
Summary: from ashen grey to fiery red. /karakuri burst au./lonashipping week | day 3: red





	dye my hands crimson

**Author's Note:**

> i'd like to apologize in advance,

The first time Gladion finds her, she’s sitting on the edge of an apartment building roof, swinging her feet nonchalantly over the bustling lights of the nighttime city.

“Law enforcement,” he says, as sternly as he can; he’s never been good at anything but intimidation, anyhow. “Ma’am, I have orders to remove you from these premises immediately.”

It’s then that he notices the shattered flowerpot on the tiles next to her. The poor shrub it once held is bent over and broken, its bright vermillion flowers plucked and petals strewn about. “Ma’am,” he tries again, a little less certain. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

That’s when he hears her talk, and isn’t that a familiar voice for all the wrong reasons, like a childhood nursery rhyme in a minor key. “I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him not,” she murmurs, almost singing under her breath as she plucks out the petals and tosses them to the street below. “I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him not. I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him not.”

The last petal stains her white gloves red as she grinds it between her fingers. “I’ll kill him,” she says, voice ringing out as if she’s made her decision. “Yes, I think I’ll kill him. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

She turns to Gladion, and he’s almost _(very)_ terrified by the way her grin seems to melt into the night. “Wouldn’t it be nice, lieutenant?” she asks, and then

Gladion wakes up in a hospital bed, an IV in the back of his hand and an ache in his back that returns every time the heart monitor beeps, and even though he’s alive and gulping down air the nightmare feels too real to be a dream, like his nightmares don’t revolve around cheshire grins and hysterical laughter already.

Somewhere, a nurse opens a door, and then Lillie is rushing in, and Gladion is ashamed to say that this is the first time he’s seen her so distraught. “Oh, thank goodness you’re awake,” she frets, because she’s Lillie and she cares more than anyone else he’s ever known. “Doctor Hazel says you shouldn’t suffer any permanent damage.”

She’s brought him his favourite chocolates, and his pillow from back home, and a small stack of books that she’s managed to cram into her lab coat. “Thank god the building was only five storeys,” she says as he pops another chocolate in his mouth (even though they taste like sawdust), “and that you managed to avoid breaking your spine in your landing. Are you still sore?”

“Yeah.”

She hands him a glass of water, and he washes down the sticky remnants of the chocolate as best as he can. “Did they catch the woman?”

Lillie frowns. “Glad, you almost just died,” she says, voice impossibly quiet. “And you’re already worried about that?”

“I want to know if I fell off a fucking roof for nothing.”

There is ice in Lillie’s eyes to evenly match the fire in his, but Gladion knows his sister, and he knows she will cave before he does. As expected, she sighs and averts her gaze, and he knows he’s won this time. “We don’t have biological data, but we do have a name,” she says, suddenly interested in her frayed hem of her smock. “Her call sign is Datura. She’s an assassin working under Mother.”

Just like that, everything else fades to white noise. Gladion flounders for words, and finds it impressive that he has none to offer. “She’s with Aether?”

“Yes.” Lillie’s voice drops once again, so soft that he has to read her lips. “Ilima rolled the security cams. She had a gun, Gladion. She could have actually killed you.”

He fixes her with a look, and not for the first time he doesn’t really feel guilty when she shudders and shrinks under his glare.

“Then I’ll just have to kill her before she does that.”

* * *

Gladion remembers:

His father is an absolute genius, building things that belong in science fiction movies and not reality. He takes Gladion’s tiny hands in his calloused ones and guides him through the steps of assembling a robot from scratch, writing the code that will bring it to life and putting the pieces together one by one.

The science is embedded into his bones, even from an early age. His mother gives him extra parts from their shipments and laughs in delight when he’s able to turn them into tiny mechanical monsters. Her laughter sounds like bells, and echoes through her garden of balsam when he plays in the yard.

In this way, it’s Lillie who becomes the real genius. Their father gifts her a little robot toy he’s crafted, a little bunny-looking thing she names Magearna, and within a month she can disassemble and reassemble the entire thing, piece for piece. She’s only eight when she designs a robot of her own, and although her young hands are unsteady when she solders the pieces together, it’s something that works. Gladion knows that his sister will someday outshine him in every way, and he’s proud of her.

Their parents are inventors—experimental scientists, really, making mechanical marvels out of seemingly nothing. Lusamine is a builder, a hands-on woman who looks like she’s never spent a day in a workshop, and Mohn is a coder, a storyteller who can turn numbers to words and words to living creatures. They build robots together; it’s what they’ve done all their lives, and it’s what Gladion and Lillie excel at. The robots become another set of children—Poipole, Nihilego, Buzzwole.

_(“You can name this AI, Gladion,” his father says, “since Lillie named the last one.” His smile, even in memory, is too kind. “It’s stronger than any of the others we’ve made. In fact, it’s strong enough to stop any of the others! So you have to give it a name that’s just as strong.”_

_He is seven and only has two missing teeth and knows exactly how to smile when he looks up and says “Silvally!” with all of his heart._

_There’s a giggle at his side that doesn’t quite sound like Lillie. No, that’s not his sister; that’s a childhood ghost that may or may not exist. “Silvally is a stupid name.”_

_“You’re a stupid name!”_

_“Hey, now, no insults,” Mohn says kindly, and Gladion can feel the hand on his shoulder, “let’s try to get along, alright? Can you two apologize to each other?”_

_A sniffle. “I’m sorry for calling your name idea stupid.”_

_Gladion doesn’t want to apologize, but clearly this ghost of the past has, so he swallows his pride. “I’m sorry for calling you a bad name, Moon.”)_

* * *

The uniform of a police officer is simple: blouse, pants, vest, hat, socks, shoes. Few have commented on how ugly it is; many joke over how it would look much better on their floor. Gladion slips the Skull Division badge on last, poking it through the bar and pinning it securely so that it doesn’t fall.

It’s not like people will notice his perfect uniform for the foreseeable future, though. Captain Guzma still grumbles that Gladion’s been assigned to the Datura case, but the rest of the team is still mildly competent, and shouldn’t fall apart without him. He’ll be off the streets for the next few weeks, cooped up indoors in a stuffy office researching and tracking down this elusive Datura.

There’s an element of nepotism in there that no one has the courage to point out. It’s almost comical that he’ll be working alongside his sister for this, especially given how she’s been doing government-protected research for years. The two of them, reunited under the same roof again, all to hunt down their madwoman of a mother. 

Gladion takes his hat off at the door, and thinks back to a much darker time in his life. Most children don’t run away from home with their siblings in tow, but Gladion remembers a night when it had been raining at the bus stop, and with nowhere to hide and rest, he’d propped a dumpster lid up against a wall and let Lillie sleep on his shoulder while the rain hammered down on the plastic over their heads.

(He may not believe in a benevolent god, but he thanks them anyways for sending Professor Kukui to rescue them, for having Professor Kukui recognize Lillie’s genius and take her in as his pupil.)

Hau welcomes him in, introduces him to the team. Lillie’s here, of course, and Gladion doesn’t point it out when he notices the way Hau’s hand lingers on hers for just a moment too long. Professor Kukui is out for the day, but his wife, Professor Burnet, is in, and gives Gladion a hug that feels more like a home than anywhere else. Her assistant, Ilima, is a man of many mysterious smiles and more laughter than words, but he offers to teach Gladion how to use the coffee machine.

The only one he isn’t familiar with is Lana, their web trawling-technician, who’s apparently at home today, but by the way Hau and Ilima shrink at her name, Gladion gets the idea he should be staying far away from her. 

“Lana deserves a break,” Lillie says, arms crossed over her chest. “She was the one who dug up all of that information on Datura in the first place.”

Gladion clears his throat. “Speaking of Datura,” he says, “what do we know about her right now?”

“We have a visual, and not much else,” Ilima admits, handing him a stack of papers. “From the surveillance footage and from your testimony, we know she wears a white lab coat and white gloves, and owns at least one firearm. Beyond that, it could be anyone’s guess.”

A messy police sketch lies at the top; the girl in the sketch has black hair cropped into a bob that falls around her shoulders. The only splash of colour in the portrait is the bright red of her irises. Yes, it all seems familiar; this looks like the woman who tried to kill him on that rooftop.

Something feels terribly wrong about it, though.

“There’s a bit more to it,” Professor Burnet says. “I don’t think she normally wears gloves. I had one of the on-scene detectives recover the flowers you said she was tearing apart.” She holds up a plastic evidence bag, shaking the petals inside. “These are _Brugmansia sanguinea_ , or red angel’s trumpets. Every part of them is highly toxic.

She tosses the bag to Gladion, who catches it with ease. “And that’s not all,” she says. “ _Brugmansia_ are flowers closely related to _Datura_ , which are equally toxic.”

Ilima hums. “I thought her call sign was a flower,” he says. “Does it have a common name?”

Professor Burnet shrugs. “Oh, a few. Angel’s trumpets, devil’s trumpets, jimsonweed… The one I’ve heard the most is moonflower.”

As Hau starts to comment on the legality of jimsonweed and Lillie starts to scold him for poking fun at a dangerous substance, Gladion just stares at the portrait in his hands.

Yes, it all seems familiar; this looks like the woman who tried to kill him on that rooftop. He knows her eyes are red—he saw them himself, in that heartbeat before she pushed him off the roof. But something about that is wrong.

Something inside tells him that those eyes were _not_ meant to be red.

* * *

It’s easy to cover the genius in Lusamine with the lunatic, and so they forget until it’s almost too late, and Lusamine has already covered up her tracks and left their trail cold once again. Lana comes back to the whole office screaming, and is not surprised in the slightest. “You guys are fools,” she scolds, pushing Ilima out of her chair (between the cute Popplio cushion and the circle of snacks around the computer, Gladion’s not sure how he didn’t realize it was her seat earlier) and immediately booting up a file. “Luckily for all of you, I actually bothered to make some backups.”

Gladion sits in the corner of the office stealing chips from Hau until he conks out from sheer boredom, and then he makes a beeline for the door the moment he wakes up. Years of police training have turned him into an outdoors person, forcing him to his feet through the starry metropolis.

He ducks and weaves between parked cars, nodding to those still walking about at this hour. Even though the sky is dark, the city is full of life, and he appreciates the subtlety of the electric colours that light his way.

Something rustles in an alleyway. He immediately swings around, hand on his police baton and hoping it’s not thugs trying to jump him _again_. There’s a giggle, and then a swish of white fabric as someone takes off like a bird across the tops of the nearby buildings.

 _White fabric._ “Stop right there!” Gladion yells, running for the fire escape that Datura is scaling. “I have a warrant for your arrest!”

The laughter does not stop, and by the time Gladion makes it to the top of the staircase, Datura is gone.

He stands around hopelessly, hands on his hips, until he spots the fleeting cloud of white slipping down the side of the building and dropping the four storeys to the street below. She’s trying to lure him away, he’s aware, but there’s no way he’s letting her get away this time.

(And even if he could, would his heart allow it?)

As Datura flees, Gladion follows from behind, staying hidden as much as he can. For all he knows, she has a third eye that she’s been using to monitor him, and his attempt at stealth has been for nothing all along. While it would be massively ironic and rather cruel if it were the truth, he honestly would not be surprised anymore.

 _She’s headed towards the park,_ he realizes, reaching for his baton again. This time, though, he uncollapses it, extending the weapon to its full length. "Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he mutters, looking around the corner. There she is, perched atop the hill in the park, robes billowing around her in the evening wind. 

Gladion approaches her slowly, even though he gets the idea she won’t bolt like some petty criminal. He’s seen plenty of those, perverts and pickpockets in the streets that run the moment they see him. Datura is not one of them. She’s one of Mother’s weapons, and for that alone, she needs to be stopped.

“Thought I was dead?” he taunts, though he gets no response. “And now you’ve resorted to trying to lure me out here at night, since your first attempt didn’t work.”

The wind hisses at him before she does. “I’m sure you enjoyed your vacation in the hospital,” she says. The moonlight bathes her and her robes in a dazzling pale light, complimenting her crimson eyes, and for a moment, Gladion is genuinely floored by how beautiful she would be if it weren’t for the murder in her gaze. “But now that you’re out of there, I do have orders to kill you from my mistress.”

“Your _mistress_ is a lunatic, an anarchist and a criminal,” he says sourly, and rushes her.

His first thought is that he was a fool to run into this fight virtually unarmed. Datura is clearly just as well versed in hand-to-hand as he is, but she has the advantage in weapon. One bullet, and he could be dead. He has pepper spray, but with the speed at which she pistol-whips him, he’s not sure he could get his hands on it.

For now, he blocks her hits and strikes out when he can. He swings his baton, and catches her in the elbow with the very tip. She cries out in pain, but punches him in the stomach with her other hand anyways, and in the time he takes to recover, scoops her gun once again.

“Who even chooses _Datura_ as their call sign?” he growls, pushing her gun aside and crossing his baton over its muzzle. He’s not sure she won’t shoot, but at least like this she won’t shoot _him_. She tries to twist away, and he presses closer, bringing their faces together over their weapons. “That’s a stupid name.”

Datura bares her teeth at him, and at this distance he can feel the heat of her breath wash over him. “ _You’re_ a stupid name,” she crows childishly.

_I’m sorry for calling you a bad name, Moon._

Her eyes go wide, and he’s sure his do too. “Moon,” he whispers, stunned for all of a heartbeat before he recovers and forces forward even harder, pushing her away. “Shut the _fuck_ up, you _monster_ , you—!”

He manages to grab the collar of her white cloak before she can wrench herself from his grasp, but then her arms slip free from the fabric, and in that instant there’s a lighter in her hand and the white cotton starts to catch fire, erasing precious evidence that he could be using to bring her to justice, and then—

Then it’s just him and the night, and the ashes that still smoulder in his hand.

* * *

“Lillie,” Gladion says, “what do you remember of Moon?”

The question clearly sets her off edge, because she puts her half-eaten sandwich down and stares at him like he’s insane. “Why now, of all times?” she asks. “You haven’t talked about Moon in years.”

He shrugs. “Remembered her a few days ago.”

Lillie is silent, and Gladion waits under her scrutiny. “She lived with us for a bit when we were younger,” she finally says. “I think when I was… five? Up until the year Father—”

“Yeah.”

“She had… grey eyes.” This memory is apparently accompanied by joy; the corners of her mouth lift up, ever so slightly. “You used to call her an alien because she had grey eyes and her name was Moon.”

“Okay, so it’s been established that I was an asshole as a kid,” he grumbles. “I mean, what happened to her? Did she go live with her relatives after what happened to Father?”

Lillie purses her lips, deep in thought. “I don’t know,” she admits. “I went to wake her up one morning, and her room was completely empty. It was like she’d never lived there in the first place. I thought either Mother had sent her away, or something had happened to her, or…” Her voice trails off, and she returns to that safe place, deep in memory. “It’s been a while since I’ve thought about her, to be honest.”

“No, it’s alright.” Gladion turns back to his soup; the broccoli chunks floating in the cream look progressively less and less appetizing. “What if she—”

“Gladion.” It’s shocking to see the sudden conviction in Lillie’s gaze. “I know you’re curious too, but please stop. In my heart, Moon escaped too, and she’s happy now. Please, just let her go.”

Behind her stony strength, Gladion finds a spark of fear—not for herself, but for the girl they may have abandoned to die—and finds that he, too, is scared.

* * *

_(“We have to find that thumb drive, Faba,” Lusamine snaps, rifling through the stacks of notebooks on Mohn’s desk, “that AI could destroy us, and we can’t afford for it to fall into the hands of his killers!”_

_Hidden from view, Gladion watches his mother tear the room to pieces, watches as she rips open the closet door and throws Lillie’s precious Magearna to the ground._

_He knows the truth. His father is not dead, just gone in another way, and his mother’s mind will not hold up under this kind of stress. Faba will take advantage of it, sway her opinion until she is ready to march her engines to war against the society that built her, and then she will stop at nothing until the world is hers and hers alone._

_Lusamine cannot have Silvally, or Type: Full, as she’s come to call it. The first thing she did after Mohn’s “passing” was to rename all of the project files, all of the AI that are the core of her operation, as so to throw any potential enemies off. Type: Full has a skeleton key that could erase any of those AI, and with enough alteration, Gladion knows that his mother could use it in its full mechanical body to topple civilization._

_Yes, she may not have Silvally, and she may no longer have her beloved Mohn, but she has Lillie, precious Lillie who has the intellect of both her parents thousandfold and could restore Silvally. Lillie who built her first robot at eight and wrote an AI at ten, Lillie who cries when she is hugged and stays silent when she is thrown to the ground and trampled upon._

_Gladion does not want to see his sister suffer anymore, and he knows how._

_Because he has Silvally, and while he may not have his father’s storytelling or his sister’s brains, Gladion is still smart. He parses through a copy of the code, finds the skeleton key, and replaces it with something useless, something that will make Lusamine hate herself for spending so long looking for a prototype that does not even work. He polishes it up, cleans up his tracks, makes sure she’ll never know the difference._

_He slides the thumb drive across the floor while her back is turned, and flees like a wounded animal. Oh yes, Lusamine will find her precious Type: Full, and when she realizes it will not bend to her will, she will look for Lillie, but it’s too late, Lillie is already gone, asleep on Gladion’s shoulder as they hide in waiting for the next bus that can take them to his friend Hau’s house, to safety. Lillie patches the cracks where he misses them, erasing the evidence further and practically deleting their existence from the internet and the technological world. The real Type: Full—Silvally—will be in its own thumb drive, tucked squarely in Gladion’s shirt pocket over his heart._

_He only looks back once as Lillie sticks her cap over her ponytail and drags him away. From an upstairs window, someone blinks out at him with owlish grey eyes._

_And then they’re gone.)_

* * *

Lana triangulates the location of one of the Aether safe houses after spending hours decoding encrypted files in every direction, and it’s only with Lillie’s assistance that they’re able to finalize an exact building. Gladion decides to take Hau and their fellow officer Kiawe in with him, and hopes it’ll be enough to draw out the Datura that he continues to track down.

They’ve taken his eyewitness account for his encounter with Datura, and if it weren’t for the fact that he’s trained himself to do this, he’s not sure he could have kept the truth of her identity a secret. She’s disappeared yet again, but he digs up old files in his spare time, hoping that something will click. It doesn’t. She really has left no trail for him to find.

But Gladion has resources, and he has a genius sister, and he has a fantastic team, and more importantly, he has the stubborn streak of a blindfolded mule, and will not stop until he catches her.

(That feeling of cotton crumbling to ash in his hand, as Datura had flown through the grass in her panic and disappeared into the night—

He’s not sure it’ll ever go away.)

“Careful, now,” Hau says, as Kiawe pries the door hinge carefully. “We don’t know how many people are in there. For all we know, there could be civilians.”

“M—Lusamine wouldn’t recruit civilians,” Gladion mutters. “And anyone dumb enough to work with her is just as guilty as she is.”

The door falls apart, and the three of them catch it just in time to set it against the alleyway. “Be on your guard,” Kiawe advises, taking his pistol out of its holster, “and stay alive.”

They head in.

The entire facility feels familiar and yet all too wrong at the same time. Everything is pure white, from the walls to the ceiling to the pristine stacks of notes on the few desks they come across, the way Lusamine likes her working environments. “It feels like an asylum,” Hau whispers.

“It might as well be,” Gladion replies.

Beyond the stillness of the facility, there’s the constant buzz of (what else?) white noise that emanates from somewhere in the ceiling, like motors at work. “There has to be a staircase up,” Gladion says, even though the white labyrinth provides none. “Who the fuck is manning this place?”

That’s when the first bullet flies through, narrowly missing him by a hair. Kiawe yells in alarm and tackles the other two to the ground just before the shower of bullets begins to rain down upon them. “Where are the bullets even coming from?” he shouts, ducking behind a desk. “Do they have some sort of machine gun?”

“It’s probably a robot,” Gladion yells, daring to peek out from behind his cubicle shelter. Just a bit ahead, a blur of purple trains in on him, swivels its barrels. “Lusamine makes them.” A bullet ricochets off a steel filing cabinet, scraping past his elbow and tearing the fabric open. He scowls. “Probably Poipole or the upgraded version that Lillie had to help make.”

The tragic flaw of these robots is that Gladion helped make them, and so in the end, he knows exactly how to destroy them. He kicks an office chair towards the source of the bullets, buying himself a few precious moments, rips the bottle out of a water cooler, and lobs it as hard as he can towards the robot. It’s not much, but there’s a horrible fizzing sound, and then a shower of sparks and an explosion.

The white noise returns, punctuated by chunks of the robot’s purple shell raining down.

“Keep moving,” he says to a flabbergasted Hau and Kiawe. “We’ll find who’s at the centre of this soon.”

The staircase turns out to be hidden in a corner, almost camouflaged with the rest of its white surroundings. Each step they take echoes in cold steel, no doubt alerting whoever’s above to their presence. Gladion has no qualms about taking them out, permanently.

The second story is quiet, much too quiet; the buzzing stops the moment they step onto solid ground. “Split up,” he urges. “But be careful. Some of the robots can be extremely fast. Shoot as needed.”

He shoulders his way past them before they can protest.

Offices line the side of this floor, each separated off into its own little room. Gladion peers into one through the glass window and sees a beyond-empty room, clearly never used. He sneaks past the next one, and nearly drops right then and there as a slim white robot ( _Pheromosa,_ he recalls) lies in wait for commands. He remembers watching it tear 16-gauge steel to pieces in seconds, and decides he doesn’t want to remember anymore.

The next office is lit. Someone’s sitting behind its lonely desk, decked in the same hallowed white that characterizes Lusamine’s operations, but it’s not Datura. Gladion reaches for his pistol, and almost growls when the woman turns around. “Wicke.”

The scientist smiles kindly. “You remember me,” she says, a lilt to her voice that he doesn’t trust _at all_. “Gladion, it’s been years.”

“Why are you still working with _her?_ ” he demands. “She’s insane! She’s going to try and topple society! I told you to run while you still had the chance, _Lillie_ told you to run while you still had the chance, and you’ve just gone and blown it!”

Wicke shakes her head. “Gladion, it was never about her, or about the two of you,” she says (god, the maternal care in her voice is _sickening)_ as she gets to her feet. “I knew you and Lillie would go on to do great things. That was not of any concern to me.” She opens a drawer in her desk, and Gladion’s grip on his pistol tightens. “It was the _work,_ the _science,_ that drew me in. You mother gave me an opportunity to build the future with her ultra beasts, and I took it.”

She looks mournfully at the office next door. “It’s a shame to see that future burn,” she says, and slams her hand down into the drawer.

Sirens start to blare. The white walls are instantly dappled in the red of warning lights, flashing in cruel circles around the facility. “My darling Blacephalon will come along soon,” she muses, and in that moment Gladion sees that her years of working with his mother have made her just as mad. “I wonder how your little friends will like a bit of fire.”

He snarls and runs for the door.

Outside the office, Hau and Kiawe are slowly fighting a losing battle. Pheromosa has been activated, and while there doesn’t seem to be any other robots, Gladion has no idea what Wicke’s “darling Blacephalon” is. “Hang tight!” he yells, lunging at the slim robot as it zips between two cubicles, racing to catch Hau.

The cold steel slips out of his hand, and then there’s a shout of pain as Pheromosa rams into Hau and sends him crashing into a bookshelf. Gladion grits his teeth, picks up his pistol, and aims at the robot’s back.

The first shot ricochets off. The second one sinks into the surface, and immediately Pheromosa turns around to face him. “Oh, you wanna go?” he taunts, grabbing a stack of papers from a nearby desk. “Let’s go.”

He barely sees the hit coming before Pheromosa’s thin metal arms connect with his stomach, but he grabs onto it, and puts a fistful of papers directly into its sight sensors. The robot whirrs in confusion, desperate to brush the papers off, and in that moment Gladion reaches out and snaps its thin neck before he doubles over in pain and retches onto the ground.

“Gladion!”

Then Kiawe’s there helping him up, and Hau’s propped up against a desk too but he’s alive. “C’mon, we need to get out of here,” he urges. “Something in the ceiling is ticking, and I’m not about to stay to find out what.”

They make it halfway down the staircase when the roof blows up, and flaming shrapnel begins to rain down on them. “Get going!” Gladion barks, and they all scramble to get down.

The first floor is already burning, the flames dancing in brilliant vermillion and licking at their ankles. The warning lights flash in rainbow colours, turning the walls to cyans and magentas before they crumble and burn to ashes. “This must be Blacephalon,” he says, and very nearly screams in frustration.

(How could he have expected Lusamine to be satisfied with the robots they’d left her? How could he have expected her _not_ to build an army more?)

He grabs Hau and Kiawe, and runs.

Smoke pours into his lungs as the cubicle labyrinth turns deadly, and he shoves his hat over his nose and mouth in a desperate attempt to buy time but his eyes sting, and as soon as the white light of the outside world appears in the doorway from whence they came he’s shoving his friends outside, _please_ make it outside they have to survive—

“GLADION!”

Against his better judgement, he turns.

It takes a moment for him to find the source of the scream, because everything is either burning or burned, but then the rainbow lights collide for a second over Wicke, illuminating her form on the ground. Soot covers her face. A flaming bookshelf has practically crushed her under its weight. “Get me out of here,” she screams.

He freezes; he backs away.

He runs.

Later, as he’s sitting in the back of an ambulance and staring up at the still-smoking remains of the building, he thinks he catches sight of a pair of red eyes in an upper-storey window, the only spot of red in a sea of black soot, staring at him with such cold, _cold_ hatred.

And then they’re gone.

* * *

“We have to tell Professor Kukui about the beast killer,” Gladion says. “If what I saw in that facility is what our mother has built, then we can’t afford to sit idly and wait for her to march her “ultra beasts” on us.”

Lillie turns to him, hands on her hips and a stormy look in her eyes that he can’t quite decipher. “No, we cannot,” she says coldly. “You saw her new creations. Do you remember Nihilego? How she made me work on it before we left? _It’s a virus, Gladion._ We can’t afford to put Type: Full on any working engine, now of any time. If Nihilego gets to it, then Mother will have won. We _cannot_ put ourselves at risk like that, not when Mother now knows that we’re actively trying to take her down.”

“She should have known from the beginning,” he growls, reaching for her coat pockets himself. He knows she keeps the thumb drive on her person; it’s just a matter of which pocket. “Father created it as a countermeasure in case the other AIs went rogue. We _need_ that countermeasure, Lillie! That is the last line of defense we have against a line of killer robots that _will_ destroy the world as we know it!”

He reaches, and Lillie yells, but his fingers close around the thumb drive, and he pulls his hand away triumphantly. “Gladion, no, will you _please_ listen,” Lillie cries, grabbing his arm, “you don’t understand—”

“I do understand, but since you’re the _smart one_ , I’m not worth listening to anyways,” he snaps, holding it over her head. “Go on, tell me how I’m wrong _again_.”

From the other side of the room, someone claps, and both Gladion and Lillie freeze.

Datura is perched on Lillie’s desk, white robes spread in a halo around her as she claps and smiles brilliantly. “Aren’t you two adorable,” she cooes. “I’ve always loved watching siblings bicker and fight over the smallest things. Y’know, who gets the last cookie, who keeps the family inheritance, who’s right about Silvally.”

Lillie drops her hand and braces her shoulders back, but there’s a shake in her stance that betrays her fear. “You shouldn’t know that name,” she hisses. “How do you know about Silvally?”

“Oh, it’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time.” Datura grins slyly as she spins a black pistol around her finger. Gladion automatically looks to his side, and finds himself entirely unarmed. “Like that. You were too busy fighting to even notice me, darling.”

“What do you want?” he snarls, hands clenching into fists and prepared to fight. She nearly killed him once; he won’t fall to her a second time.

“Isn’t that easy?” Datura extends her other hand languidly, beckoning him forward. “I want the thumb drive. Silvally. Type: Full. The beast killer. Whatever you want to call it.”

The pistol clicks when she turns the safety off and points it at Lillie’s head. “Or do you need a little incentive to do it?”

“You wouldn’t _dare_ —”

“Oh, but I would.” Her voice drops to a low purr. “You’ve forgotten that I could have snapped your spine. I know you better than you know yourself, Gladion. I can make your life worse than hell.” She tilts her head, as if curious to hear how he’s going to respond, and cocks the gun. “Starting right now.”

“Don’t do it, Gladion,” Lillie pleads, as if he’s the one being held at gunpoint. As if his life is worth anything compared to hers. “You can’t let _her_ win.”

“I can’t let her kill you,” he mutters, and unclenches his fist.

It’s been nearly ten years since he escaped that hellhole with Lillie in tow. He hasn’t let this thumb drive out of his sight since.

He drops his hands (Lillie is crying) and moves forward _(Lillie is crying)_ and places the thumb drive in Datura’s outstretched palm. “There.”

Her fingers close around the plastic shell, and the cheshire grin returns. “Thanks,” she chirps, “except you know I can’t let you go that easily, right? Mohn’s mind survives past him, and really, it’s thanks to you that I even have to do this.”

Gladion lunges. Lillie screams. Datura grins.

She shoots.

* * *

The guest list for Lillie’s funeral is short, mostly because Gladion cuts it down and down and down again. The final lineup is just Kukui and Burnet, and Hau and Ilima and Lana, and him.

They all cope differently. Kukui and Burnet, with his blessing, auction off all of Lillie’s clothes and things and donate the proceeds to orphanages and shelters, having lost the girl they thought of as a daughter. Ilima stops bickering with Lana over the small things in the office, and Lana stops bringing in Lillie’s favourite snacks. Hau becomes quiet, too quiet.

Everyone blames themselves, in a way, but none so much as Gladion. He watches as his beloved baby sister is lowered into the ground, the bullet hole that became her undoing carefully hidden under a wreath of white lilies. 

He thinks about the fight with Lillie, and Datura’s words immediately after she’d shot the fatal bullet. _You let the woman who loved me like a daughter burn in that fire,_ she’d crowed, as Lillie had bled out in his arms and he’d pleaded for her to stay with him. _You killed the one person who loved me all my life. I want to see you_ burn _like she did._

“Gladion,” Hau croaks to him, “it wasn’t your fault.”

“Stop it, Hau. It was entirely my fault and you know it.”

The other boy stares blankly at Lillie’s grave. “You couldn’t have known that she would shoot,” he argues (except Gladion knew, he _knows_ Datura, knows her better than anyone else). “If anyone’s at blame, it’s her. Not you. You tried to save Lillie.”

He scoffs. “And I accomplished jack shit and gave Silvally away.” He turns his hat restlessly in his hands, ignoring the way the fabric chafes his knuckles. “Just. Leave me alone, Hau. I’m sorry, but I need…”

_I need to be alone. I need Lillie back. I need Silvally back. I need to bring justice for them. I need to kill Datura._

_I need Moon back._

Thankfully, Hau gets the message, claps him on the back once, and leaves him alone to go stand with Lana and Ilima.

The voices haunt him more than the memories do. Datura laughing as she throws his gun to the ground and flees out the window. Wicke’s screams as the burning shelf crushed her. Lillie’s anger at him, and her fear in her final moments. Moon, the epitome of childhood naivety, asking him about Silvally. Moon, who he left to die at his mother’s hands. Moon, who became his darkest night.

He needs those voices out of his head.

He doubts they’ll ever leave.

* * *

The next few weeks are too quiet, as if Datura is giving him time to grieve. There’s a few reports of people going missing throughout the city, but none that can be traced back to her or to his mother.

Gladion wakes up one night to the sound of the city on fire, and knows that _her_ plan has finally begun.

He scrambles madly out of bed, almost goes to headquarters, but then there’s a text from the captain and one from Professor Kukui, each with the same order: _stay safe and find Datura._ He checks his pistol, holsters it, and pauses for a heartbeat at the picture of Lillie on his desk.

 _This is for you,_ he swears, and runs.

The streets are already in a state of absolute pandemonium. Civilians are screaming as robots crawl across their houses and rip the bricks out like they’re sandcastles. Trees turn into flaming beacons as Wicke’s Blacephalon AI sprays its unholy rain of kerosene over parks. A public restroom unroots itself from the ground, _grows legs_ and _walks_ , each mechanical step screeching to the cries of onlooking civilians.

Gladion’s feet take him down a familiar path. He remembers it: the call from some worried biker; _hey, so there’s this lady sitting on the edge of a roof throwing flower petals into the street, is that legal?;_ the fire escape staircase that felt like an eternity to climb; the rooftop that was too quiet as he approached a white-clad figure whose song will haunt him for an eternity.

This time, she’s just standing there, waiting. Fire licks at the edges of the building, threatening to devour them whole but never quite having the height to. “ _Glad_ of you to join me, lieutenant,” she says, obviously trying to keep a straight face despite the vacant look in her eyes. “Your mother thought the infrastructure could use some redesigns.”

“My mother is a lunatic,” he says, feeling like a broken refrain. “And so are you.”

He charges.

The recoil hits him almost instantly when they clash, because Gladion is trained in defensive hand-to-hand combat. Datura, on the other hand, immediately begins to retaliate, and punishes him for daring to strike her. He rams his elbow into her chest, and she grabs his entire arm and _twists._ He howls in pain, and she grins, ready to throw him down and put a bullet through his skull, just as she did with his pretty little sister—

Except Gladion is still _right there,_ and catches her off guard when he slams into her with his shoulder. She topples over and skids across the roof, and he lunges down after her.

They land. Something clatters against the concrete.

“Silvally,” Datura whispers, reaching out even though he has her pinned to the ground. In his peripherals, Gladion sees the thumb drive land just out of reach, in range of the flames. “No, let me up, I can’t let Silvally—”

“Shut up,” Gladion yells, reaching to unholster his pistol with his uninjured hand. “Shut UP! You don’t get Silvally! You don’t _deserve_ it!”

“IT’S THE ONLY GOOD THING I HAVE LEFT,” Datura screams. “IT’S THE ONLY THING THAT REMINDS ME OF _YOU_ , GLADION!”

(Because under the facade, under the mask of the cold-blooded killer, Moon is just a little girl aged five.

She’s scared too.)

 ~~Datura~~ _Moon_ is crying now. “Please,” she cries, “just let me have _this_.”

Gladion looks down at her, at the pistol in his hand, at the way his shoulder sits unevenly, at the thumb drive that crackles as it burns. At her red, red eyes.

They were once grey.

“I’m sorry,” he chokes.

He shoots.

**Author's Note:**

> yeah so um. yeah  
> i tried to keep a lot of aspects of the original karakuri burst storyline, but then translating them to this universe kinda made them wonky? like how the ring became the thumb drive with Silvally, and the ultra beasts became robots built by Lusamine and Mohn. a few parts really did not translate well, so i just. cut them  
> Mohn is probably braindead or amnesic or in prison or all three  
> also coincidentally the role of Lily from karakuri burst lined up with Lillie here, and tbh when i realized that i spent a good five minutes laughing in the shower
> 
> some botany:  
> the Brugmansia sanguinea is a real flower, and it is vividly red and quite beautiful! Brugmansia and Datura species, while closely related, are not the same - Brugmansias tend to hang down, while Daturas open upward. both Brugmansia and Datura are in the nightshade family (the Solanaceaes) and every part of them is very toxic. don't play with Brugmansias and Daturas, kids  
> i did choose Datura as Moon's call sign intentionally though! in a tragic attempt to reflect Tsubaki's call sign (meaning camellia in japanese) i scoured my flower manuals and the internet for red flowers, and i eventually settled on Datura because a) Daturas are called moonflowers, b) they're massively toxic and c) the Brugmansia sanguinea is a red flower that's close enough to a Datura for it to work out. at the end of the day there just weren't enough options and i ended up choosing this one  
> if you've read through my fic _and _my entire botany spiel then thank you so much and i hope i haven't bored you to death__


End file.
